I guess everyone starts to look inward a little more during bleak winter months. With everything outside hidden under ice and snow, turning our attention inside just seems practical. There’s any number of ways to enjoy sun-drenched views without even leaving your couch. But it was just the other day that I realized how truly transporting a virtual trip via book or laptop can be. I was working on the painting you see below. I was trying to get the shapes and colours in the far background right. I wanted to convey the heat, the dust, the sheer distance. It was fun to explore and yet it’s a place I’ve never actually seen and probably never will.

Acrylic, December 13, 2024

I was following a lesson taught by Malcolm Dewey, a prolific fine artist and art teacher offering oodles of painting courses on his website. I suppose I could take a class with Mr. Dewey in the flesh but he lives and works in South Africa which is probably almost exactly on the opposite side of the planet from my home.

A lot of the photos Mr. Dewey uses as references for various painting techniques which he teaches virtually are taken (I’m assuming by him) in places around his home. This includes the photo used for the lesson resulting in the painting shown above. So there I was squidging paints around on my palette in an effort to conjure up the colours that would capture the feeling of, what, African savannah? But for a few moments, trying to find those colours dropped me straight into that countryside, complete with the smell of grasses slowly parching in the blazing sun.

Closer to home

I’m also a student of Shari Blaukopf, a fine artist and teacher specializing in watercolour and gouache. She lives in a small town near Montreal, Quebec. It is a place I could get to relatively easily if I applied myself but she also offers a terrific range of online courses. Many of the paintings she shares in her e-newsletter are recent renderings of scenes around her home and are very relatable to me since, like a fair amount of Canada these days, the views are covered in snow.

As much as I love delving into an exotic (to me) scene of savannah or South African farm, I find Ms. Blaukopf’s completely different approach to subject matter equally appealing and transportive. She can (and does) turn scenes like the one she did recently of a huge dumpster, featured front and centre, appear both real and abstract and entirely magical.

SIDENOTE: One of Blaukopf’s works, “October Corn“. was recently selected to be one of 25 paintings included in the Canadian Society Of Painters In Water Colour’s gift to King Charles III’s Royal Collection Trust, residing in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. Huge honour, of course, but you have to check out the painting itself. It’s a view, simply, of cornstalks. And it is stunning.

Both Dewey and Blaudopf have taught me a lot not only about painting but about finding and appreciating, even celebrating, the colours, textures, shapes, atmospheres that are all around us, virtually and IRL. Stuff that can shift your reality for a moment–especially welcome when summer and the enveloping green-ness of a garden are a long way away.